tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Nov 08 16:02:44 1995
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]
be' and loD
nughItlh r'Hul:
>>>>
I think that could be it. <puqbe'> (and <puqloD>) seem to be one of the
few compound nouns where the second noun describes the first. i.e.
type of child. Almost all the others, that I can find, are the opposite.
<jolpa'> for example, its a type of room, not a type of transport beam.
<<<<
I don't see any evidence that be' and loD are describing puq in these
words. be' is glossed as "female, woman (n)", and loD as "male, man
(n)". Taking the words and the rules as they are recorded in TKD,
puqbe' = 'female who is a child', i.e., an immature female or immature
woman [biologically, not psychologically!]; and similarly for puqloD. Just
because the closest existing English expressions are "girl-child" and
"woman-child" (& similarly...) doesn't mean that every language that
compounds these words must use the word meaning 'child' as the head
(i.e., the main noun) and the word that distinguishes sex as the modifier.
I'm perfectly content to view puqbe' and puqloD as ordinary N+N
compounds, with modifier before head: 'child-woman' and 'child-man'.
If one accepts this view, the only question left about these words is why
they use puq as modifier rather than as head. We *could* write it off to
unknown historical causes.
I offer here a speculation, uncontaminated by evidence. I am not even
suggesting that this is correct, because I can't support it, but I present it
as an existence proof that explanations *can* be sought. Since we have
a generalization from canon that modifier precedes head in N+N
compounds, we should seek an explanation that maintains this
generalization, as long as it doesn't violate any other canonical evidence.
Here is one such:
In Klingon culture, at the time these compounds became lexical (i.e., a
regular part of the vocabulary), nouns such as 'husband', 'sister',
'mother' were viewed primarily as expressing the two-sided kindred
relationships 'spouse', 'sibling', 'parent'*, with the person's sex being
secondary (though not necessarily unimportant!); thus, 'husband' was
expressed as 'male/man' + 'spouse'. These relationships are "two-sided"
in that both people put something into the relationship: they have rights
and obligations, and their honor is affected by the way they deal with
these. [It's irrelevant to this argument that we have no evidence for the
independent use of *nal 'spouse'. It might have fallen out of use since
the time in question, or it might simply not have come up in Okrand's
elicitations.]
But an infant is not capable of understanding rights, obligations, and
honor. A parent has obligations to the infant, the maintenance of which
affects the parent's honor, but the infant has no obligations to maintain
and no way to lose or gain honor. He or she is not a participant in a
two-sided relationship, but, so to speak, the object of a one-way
relationship, with a status simply of 'child' rather than 'somebody's
relative'. And so the infant was referred to as a 'child' (puq) if this
non-relational status was the point of discussion, or else simply as a
male or a female person (loD/be'), or possibly, most generally, just as a
person (ghot or nuv). When a speaker felt it necessary to specify both
the 'child' status and the sex, there was no structural pressure to use
the same form of compounding as in loDnal (etc.), because puq didn't
express a *relationship*. In fact, that difference could have created a
structural pressure *against* the sex-first order.
And so the words that came to be lexicalized for child status plus
specification of sex had the sex specifier as head, in the normal final
position, rather than having the relation specifier as head.
How does this explanation stack up against the evidence? If it is true, it
maintains the general rule that head precedes modifier in N+N
compounds, and it doesn't go against anything else we know about
Klingon language and culture or about language and culture in general. If
it is false... well, the exceptional order of puqbe' and puqloD remains
unexplained.
tlhIngan veQbeq marqem la'Hom : Subcommander marqem, Klingon
Sanitation Corps
Heghbej ghIHmoHwI'pu'! : Death to litterbugs!
Mark A. Mandel
Dragon Systems, Inc. : speech recognition : +1 617 965-5200
320 Nevada St. : Newton, Mass. 02160, USA : [email protected]